Yuyu Joins Growing OTT-SVOD Crowd

Digital Media Rights, a New York-based video aggregation company with more than 8,000 TV shows and movies under license, is pushing more deeply into the world of subscription VOD with the recent debut of a service called Yuyu.

DMR, which already distributes content through digital distribution deals with partners such as Amazon Prime and Hulu, plans to launch six subscription-based OTT services before the end of the year, according to DMR CEO Michael Hong.

Half of them are already launched. In addition to Yuyu, DMR also runs Midnight Pulp (horror and thriller titles, relaunched in February) and Asian Crush (pan-Asian content, relaunched in April).

With Yuyu, DMR is going with a general entertainment service that offers content into more than a dozen categories and genres, such as “Binge Worthy” television and “Stranger Than Fiction” documentaries.

Yuyu is launching with more than 350 titles, including Johnny Suede with Brad Pitt, 95 Miles to Go with Ray Romano, crime documentary Where Is Robert Fisher?, and Misfits, a story about LGBT teens in the heart of the Bible Belt.

Yuyu is currently offered on Roku players and Roku TVs, mobile devices, Web browsers, with development underway for Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, Sony smart TVs, and the Google Chromecast.

DMR hasn’t announced the other three SVOD services that are in the works, but those in its current batch cost $4.99 per month each, and are hybrids in the sense that they are also supplemented by advertising.

Using “TV That Isn’t Basic” as its tagline, Yuyu aims to offer content that isn’t offered on traditional cable networks or YouTube, but fills a niche that falls somewhere in between.

“It’s a very exciting time for independent publishers. We kind of want to bridge the gap,” Hong said. “We’re not about [filling] programming gaps that are obscure or marginal. We’re talking about huge, impactful genres that the traditional networks are totally missing the boat on."

Hong said DMR has international rights for most of its content. While the initial focus is on the U.S. and Canada, the company intends to expand initially to other English-speaking territories later.

More detail about DMR’s OTT strategy, including a focus on community-building, will be covered in the Next TV section of the August 29 issue of Multichannel News.